How to diagnose organizational culture (and have a shot at changing it)

Where to start?

Whenever someone talks about organizational culture people immediately picture different things: How people work, what activities are done to help team building, what processes exist or how space, artifacts and values shape what we do and how we think. Within all of these areas of influence, there are always values and competing values that will shape an organization for the better, or for the worst.

Kim Cameron describes a simple framework to be able to understand what spheres of influence we need to pay attention too and which competing forces exist between them. There are basically four quadrants which focus on people management, hierarchy, innovation in products/services offered and client/market focus. At the same time these quadrants have different attributes to them, like flexibility and discretion, stability and control, internal focus and integrations and external focus and differentiation, which are showed in the following graphic:

The competing values of Total Quality Management

This Framework is very helpful because it identifies very quickly the key elements of the four main cultural patterns/structures that underly good organizational performance: Clan, Hierarchy, Market and Adhocracy (which stands for…